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Kimberley
Cornish,
author of best-seller The
Jew of Linz,
writes from Australia, on Sunday, December 26, 1999

The Spectator review said
that my book contained no argument at all, and the
Economist that I was in a
conspiracy with Rupert Murdoch to denigrate the
memory of a great philosopher! (The
Economist refused to print my
reply, incidentally.) The book in fact contained a near
deductive argument that every single British critic appears
to have missed, but that you might like to see spelled
out:

Ludwig Wittgenstein was indeed the object of
Adolf Hitler's very first recorded anti-Semitic
epithet. Minus the names I shall list in a moment, the
argument is essentially identical to that presented in
"The Jew of Linz", but
the journal critics appear to have overlooked it in the mass
of background material I provided.

The first sixteen names on the list below were provided
by the current Principal of the Fadingerstrasse
Bundesrealgymnasium in Linz, the re-titled name of the
Realschule that Hitler and Wittgenstein both attended. It
turns out that the names and religious affiliations of the
students have survived. Here then, is a list of
ALL students at the Linz Realschule
in 1903/4 who were halachically Jewish (that is, Jewish
under Jewish religious law):

1. Friedmann Paul DOB: 18.08.1886

2. Groag Wilhelm DOB: 07.01.1892

3. Grün Oskar DOB: 08.09.1892

4. Klein Oswald DOB: 23.03.1889

5. Ludwig Robert DOB: 18.06.1886

6. May Heinrich DOB: 15.05.1890

7. Peschek Oskar DOB: 07.11.1890

8. Pisinger Fritz DOB: 08.08.1892

9. Piskaty Erwin DOB: 13.06.1890

10. Pisker Johann DOB: 07.09.1887

11. Rosenblum Emil DOB: 28.03.1891

12. Rübinstein Ernst DOB: 31.01.1890

13. Taussig Bruno DOB: 24.04.1890

14. Taussig Erwin DOB: 04.12.1890

15. Taussig Victor DOB: 09.03.1887

16. Vogelfänger Gustav DOB: 03.01.1892

17. Wittgenstein Ludwig DOB: 26.04.1889

continued in next panel

Alone of the 17 students in this list, Wittgenstein was
enrolled as a Roman Catholic. To the schoolboys, however, he
appeared Jewish and was indisputably "of Jewish descent".
His halachic Jewishness is established not by the fact that
he later "confessed" to being Jewish at Cambridge or claimed
that his thought was "100 percent Hebraic" and that he was
the greatest of Jewish thinkers, but because his three
Jewish grand-parents and Jewish mother make him Jewish under
Jewish religious law. Though halachically Jewish,
Wittgenstein, unlike the others, was enrolled as a Catholic.
All the others listed were registered as Jews and therefore
knew they were Jews.

Now here is the very earliest record of Hitler making an
anti-Semitic remark: It was reported by Franz
Keplinger. Keplinger, interestingly was not in Hitler's
class, but in Wittgenstein's. (This data also provided by
the Bundesrealgymnasium.) He knew and visited Hitler later
in Munich. Keplinger recounted to Dr Franz Jetzinger:
"Once Adolf shouted at another boy, 'Du Saujud!'. The boy
concerned was staggered; he knew nothing of his Jewish
ancestry at the time and only discovered it years later ...
" (Jetzinger, Franz. Hitlers
Jugend, Vienna 1956, translated as
Hitler's Youth, by Lawrence
Wilson, Greenwood Press, Connecticut, p.71.)

The rider adding that the boy knew nothing of his Jewish
ancestry gives the quote the ring of truth and enables us to
deduce who the boy was. The only
POSSIBLE candidate on the list as the
target of Hitler's abuse is Ludwig Wittgenstein. The others
knew they were Jews, if not from their parents enrolling
them as Jews and consequent different treatment in religious
education classes, then via their circumcised state amidst
the uncircumcised Austrian schoolboys in the changing
room.

Ray Monk reports on p.5. of his Wittgenstein
biography that one of Wittgenstein's aunts did not know the
Vienna Wittgenstein family was Jewish and had to be informed
its members were "pur sang". It was clearly not common
knowledge within the family, but suppressed as a sort of
skeleton in the family closet. That is, the boy at the
school whom Hitler abused in his very first recorded
anti-Semitic remark was the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, the
stuttering, truss-wearing, homosexual son of the richest man
in the Austro-Hungarian empire.

The ONLY way in which the
deductive power of this conclusion can be avoided is if the
school contained other students of detectably Jewish
descent. (Quite apart from the statistical considerations
adduced in my book for doubting there could have been more
than one or two other students of detectable "Jewish
descent" at the school, Brigitte Hamann's book
"Hitler's Vienna" points out
that there were no more than 1,102 Jews in all of Upper
Austria, that the number of Jews in Linz was roughly
constant over the decade 1900-10 at about 5-600, and the
Linz Realschule Jews at about 15. There was no intermarriage
in Linz and precious little in all provincial Austria.)

This argument, I think, establishes that whatever critics
might say, the case I presented will not go away. Even
without the "Mein Kampf" quote
about there being a Jewish boy at the school whom Hitler and
the other boys distrusted -- or the strikingly unusual "Sie"
as opposed to "Du" locution in both Hitler and Wittgenstein
-- and the photograph of the two of them together, the case
remains compellingly strong. It would admit of being
established purely deductively should genealogical research
on the non-Jewish students show that no others were of
detectably Jewish descent. This research - on the religious
affiliation of every student's ancestors going back 3
generations - is now in progress.